Sunday, November 20, 2016

Fair Vote Canada’s new Rural-Urban modelcalled for 15% top-up MPs. Can it be
made to work well with only 10% top-up MPs? This lets us keep all the present
riding boundaries, by adding 33 additional MPs.

Yes, and we will have 66 local
single-member ridings for rural and small-urban communities across the ten
provinces. We will need 269 MPs elected from 64 multi-member ridings.

Adding the 33 additional MPs to
top-up the results in each province (plus the three MPs from the Territories)
brings the House to 371 MPs, under this “Rural-Urban + 10% model.” (Adding 10%
means 33 more MPs.)

Rural and small-urban communities can have 66 single local
MPs

My previous simulationassumed 15% top-up seats, room for which would be created by making all
existing ridings 17% bigger. This model included 74 single-MP ridings
corresponding to about 88 single-member seats before reconfiguration. Avoiding
the need for reconfiguration brings us back to 88 seats, but to keep the level
of proportionality the same with only 10% top-up MPs, I have grouped 22 of these into two-member ridings,
bringing the number down to 66.

Better
regional representation

As with any PR model applied to the votes cast in
2015, it gives better regional representation.

Liberal voters will be fairly represented from all
parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Vancouver Island and the BC Interior,
Manitoba outside Winnipeg, and southwestern Ontario. So will Conservative
voters in Atlantic Canada, the west half of Quebec, the Greater Toronto Area,
Northern Ontario, Winnipeg, and Metropolitan Vancouver. So will NDP and Green
voters everywhere. And voters will be able to vote for who they want, not just
against who they don’t want.

Perfectly
proportional

The result of my “Rural-Urban + 10%” simulation
on the 2015 votes is almost perfectly proportional. If we had used
province-wide perfect proportionality for 371 MPs, the results would have been:
Liberal 152, Conservative 118, NDP 73, Bloc 17, Green 11. My simulation gives
the Bloc 16 and the Conservatives 119, otherwise perfectly proportional. (Yes,
in six provinces one party gets a one-seat bonus, but they mostly cancel out
nationally.)

With this “Rural-Urban + 10%” model, the larger
number of 2-MP ridings brings the average District Magnitude of the multi-MP
ridings down to 4.2 MPs. That would not be very proportional, except that the
33 additional top-up MPs make the result proportional.

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Maryam Monsef keeps saying a top concern is
for marginalized voters in rural and remote communities who do not feel
represented. Many would certainly not feel represented by their Conservative
MPs.

Canada has 33 metropolitan areas,
and 225 of Canada’s ridings are entirely or primarily in them. The other 113
are in non-metropolitan areas.

Unrepresented
voters in non-metropolitan areasis
a big problem in the West.

Western 39 non-metropolitan ridings

In
the four western provinces, Liberal voters in the 39 non-metropolitan ridings
cast over 23% of the votes, but elected only one MP, and she barely counts as non-metropolitan. West
Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country is only 55% outside the Vancouver metropolitan
area, and Pam Goldsmith-Jones was mayor of West Vancouver.

Conservative
voters in those 39 ridings cast 50.8% of the votes, yet elected 74% of those MPs,
29 of the 39. As for NDP voters, with only 20% of the vote concentrated in
their strongholds, they elected nine of those 39.

We
see the same problem in Ontario’s 25 non-metropolitan ridings, where Liberal
voters cast 38.6% of the votes, but elected only 7 of those MPs, 28%. A good
regional proportional system would have let them elect at least three more MPs,
such as Katie Omstead from Chatham—Kent, Owen Sound communications
consultant Kimberley Love, and Orillia’s former hospital CEO Liz Riley, or journalism professor Allan Thompson from Kincardine, Sarnia’s Dave McPhail, oraboriginal lawyer Trisha Cowie in Muskoka Lakes.

Statistics

Footnote on stats: As of the 2011 census those 33 metropolitan areas contained
69.1% of Canadians. Those 225 ridings are 67.4% of the 334 ridings other than
the Territories and Labrador, or 66.6% of the full 338 ridings.

About Me

Although I am a member of Fair Vote Canada's Council at the federal level, the views expressed on this blog are my own.
I have been a lawyer since 1971, an elected school trustee from 1982 to 1994, past chair of the Board of the Northumberland Community Legal Centre, and so on.